Sunday, May 25, 2008

Crashing by Design

This coming Thursday should see an interesting announcement: the Times of London and Harper Collins ran a contest a couple months back calling for cover designs for the upcoming reissue of J.G. Ballard's Crash:

The competition will be judged by Ballard, who will chose the winning design from a shortlist of six selected by the Harper Collins design team. The winner will see their design used on a limited edition of Crash, due to be published in September 2008...

All designs must be 197mm x 129mm in size, and include the book title, the author's name, theHarper Perennial logo and this quote, ‘A work of very powerful originality. Ballard is amongst our finest writers of fiction’ Anthony Burgess.

Designers were then asked to upload their cover design to Flikr. Whether this approach ever becomes more than a novelty as a way to design covers remains to be seen -- but it's certainly a diverting twist.